ABSTRACT
Art historians have approached artistic education in nineteenth-century France through pedagogical theories and practices, which is how Jean-Henri Cless represents it in a drawing from 1804 of Jacques Louis David's atelier. This chapter focuses on two practices of the system — the charges or hazing of the atelier and the concours or competition structure of the Ecole. It argues that these served to socialize the student into the homosocial professional group and into the award system that both defined the French artistic arena and comprised a state mechanism for establishing a gender order. The chapter follows an aspect of the atelier-Ecole system ignored by Bourdieu — its homosocial logic — and to examine the system's role in gendering the professional identity of the nineteenth-century artist. The Ecole concours, in turn, socialized students into the defining professional practices of French art: since 1793 the arena of artistic production had been structured by the system of awards distributed to French artists.
